[olpc-help] OpenOffice Files in Write Activity?

[Rick Emery]

Sorry I haven't gotten back to this sooner; combination of the  
holidays and the flu :-(

Quoting BruceM <community-support at lists.laptop.org>:

> Watch out, however, the "rtf"produced by Write is not the ordinary  
> rtf; it is an AbiWord-format file.  However, if you have AbiWord on  
> your Mac or PC, you can load this pseudo-rtf file, and write it out  
> as real (ordinary) rtf, or as Open doc (.odt), .doc, html, latex,  
> and other formats.

I was reluctant from the beginning to use rtf, as I have always heard  
it's not a standard. But since it seems to be the only common file  
format...

Here's what I tried:

- I copied the .odt file from my USB thumb drive to the journal, where  
it appeared as expected. When I tried to resume it with Write, the  
computer seemed to be doing something, but I waited a *very* long time  
and nothing happened. By the way, last night I tried to open the .odt  
file using AbiWord on my Windows XP laptop and got the same thing (the  
AbiWord process was alive and consuming memory, and the OS slowed to a  
crawl, but I waited more than 30 minutes while AbiWord said "Importing  
Document..." before I finally killed the process).

- On our home computer, I opened the .odt file with OpenOffice and  
saved it as an .rtf file. Much to my surprise, the file went from ~3MB  
(for the original .odt file) to more than 50MB. I also opened the  
OpenOffice generated .rtf file with AbiWord and re-saved it (as an  
AbiWord .rtf). Again, the file was larger than 50MB. I also saved it  
as an AbiWord native document (.abw extension). I tried copying all 3  
of these (the two .rtf and the .abw) into the journal from my USB  
thumb drive, but they never appeared in the journal.

> Conversely, Write cannot load ordinary rtf files (e.g., copied to  
> the Journal from a USB stick) and messes up txt files (converting  
> double-blanks to an Ê-blank pair).
>
> You can start a new Write activity and type ctrl-N and it will put  
> Write in AbiWrite mode.  Then you can use AbiWrite as usual, but you  
> will be loading/saving files to the Linux file system (not to the  
> Journal).

I didn't know about this; I'll try it, if I can get the file copied over.

I'm fairly Linux savvy...can anybody tell me to where would I copy the  
files using the command line to have them appear in the Journal  
activity?

> It would really by nice to have better text-file interoperability  
> between the XO and other systems.

I tend to agree, though when I find something I can't do with the XO I  
remind myself who the *real* target audience is, and wonder if it's  
functionality they would need/use.

Thanks for the replies I've received so far!
Rick